Paradise – Martin Hiendl

Opera installation for singer, speaker, chorus, ensemble, electronics and video (120 min) in collaboration with stage designer Judith Selenko, video by Monica Duncan for the Steirischer Herbst/Musikprotokoll 2016 and the Kunstuniversität Graz

“The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust”, writes Donna Haraway in “A Cyborg Manifesto”. In this opera installation for eight voices, ensemble, electronics and video, inspired by the 1995 science fiction anime classic “Ghost in the Shell” by Mamoru Oshii, two protagonists search for their “natural” voices. One of them – She – might have been a cyborg once, a creature of technology, a human machine, a machine-like human, an asexual being, and yet driven by a desire to know more about her origins. She has doubts about her identity. Having turned into a mass product, her voice no longer signifies her uniqueness. The other one – He/She/It – is a new entity: A Golem, Frankenstein or Puppet Master, a living thing striving for individuality. A relationship develops between the two that tells of the nature and boundaries of identity, of hybrid bodies, split egos and the need for recognition. We are in PARADISE, in the Garden of Eden, which we don’t recognise, which never existed. It is but a human invention – it means no more than a word to a cyborg.

This garden is a place designed for people to walk around. PARADISE is an opera consisting not of chronological sequences, but of spatialised scenes, of walk-in spaces. The music and bodies are trapped in these spaces, leaving it to the audience when to enter a scene and when to leave it